1. Field
One embodiment of the invention relates to a moving picture encoding technique applied to an information processing apparatus such a personal computer.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, personal computers having software encoders mounted thereon to encode moving pictures according to softwares start to be popularly and widely used. Further, recently, as the next-generation moving picture compression encoding technique, much attention is being paid to the H.264/Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard.
The H.264/AVC standard is the compression encoding technique having higher performance in comparison with the conventional compression encoding technique such as MPEG2 or MPEG4. Therefore, in the encoding process corresponding to the H.264/AVC standard, a larger processing amount is required in comparison with the conventional compression encoding technique such as MPEG2 or MPEG4. Based on the above fact, various proposals have been made to reduce the moving picture encoding processing amount (for example, refer to Jpn. Pat. Appln. KOKAI Publication No. 2006-25077).
In the encoding process corresponding to the H.264/AVC standard, a processing amount for determination of a prediction mode for each macro block is large. Particularly, in a high profile (HP), an optimum one of the discrete cosine transformation (DCT) of the block size of 4×4 pixels and the DCT of the block size of 8×8 pixels can be selected when the block size of the prediction mode is 8×8 pixels or more in the inter-predicting operation.
As a result, (prediction modes of the prediction mode number×2 are provided in practice) and a processing amount for the prediction mode determination process of the inter-predicting operation increases with the number of prediction mode candidates. Therefore, it is strongly required to develop a mechanism which efficiently performs the prediction mode determination process while suppressing a lowering in the picture quality or the like, for example.